Megadroughts in past 2000 years worse, longer, than current droughts
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/megadroughts-in-past-2000-years-worse-longer-than-current-droughts/
What hockeystick eh? A new atlas shows droughts of the past were worse than those today — and they cannot have been caused by man-made CO2. Despite the claims of “unprecedented” droughts, the worst droughts in Europe and the US were a thousand years ago. Cook et al 2015[1] put together an old world drought atlas from tree rings data as a proxy for summer wetness and dryness across Europe. They compare the severity and timing of European droughts with the North American Drought Atlas (NADA) released in 2004. Yes, it’s a tree ring study with all the caveats about how trees are responding to several factors at once etc etc. But at least the modern era is measured with the same proxy as used in the old eras. Something else is causing droughts, something modern models don’t include: “megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes.” The worst megadrought in the California and Nevada regions was from 832 to 1074 CE (golly, […]Rating: 10.0/10 (3 votes cast)
— gReader Pro
